Where is “society”?

摘要

The impetus for this editorial came from a sociological research exchange day. After diverse presentations, my colleague spontaneously burst out: “But where is society in all of these inquiries?” By “society”, my colleague would refer to something more tangible and structurally ordered than descriptions of individual views, interactions, identity formations, and emotions. My colleague is not alone in feeling perplexed. During the 50 years that have passed since the infancy of the socalled cultural turn, there have been plenty of attempts to update the definition of the core tasks in social sciences. The focus on cultural meaningmaking in human social interaction and relationships often aim to further knowledge in terms of broader abstract ideas exposing the grammar in which human societies work and evolve. But what do we mean by “society”?.